In the last few years, there have been major advances in studying susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI), filtered SWI phase images and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM). Our pioneering work in SWI has focused on all three of these directions but always with the goal of understanding vascular disease in the brain, function of the brain via local oxygen saturation and total iron content.
Our implementation of QSM, referred to as SWIM (susceptibility weighted imaging and mapping), is fast, robust and can be used with very high resolution matrices. SWIM also makes it possible to remove artifacts from SWI thereby creating a "true" SWI data set or tSWI.
SWI and SWIM have many clinical applications from studying aging (via iron content and reduced oxygen saturation), dementia (via cerebral microbleeds), multiple sclerosis (via iron content increases in lesions, basal ganglia and thalamus), stroke (via changes in oxygen saturation) and traumatic brain injury (via microbleeds and venous damage).
This site has been established to enhance our collaborations for basic and clinical research in SWI and SWIM where we believe by working together we can make a difference not only in the diagnosis of disease but in better understanding the etiology of disease and potentially developing new treatments.